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The trouble with the 7 Day FPS Challenge is that its name is just so damned cryptic. I’m going to have to spend hundreds of words explaining what it means to you before I can even begin to say anything useful about it.
Right, let’s start at the beginning. When God decided to build the universe, he first had to travel forward in time and consult the ancient Jewish calendar, thus establishing that a week would eventually come to constitute seven days. He then proceeded to conveniently build the universe within this arbitrary, but admittedly useful for the purposes of scheduling, timeframe.

When God decided to build Doom in 1992, he first had to travel forward in time to read games magazines circa 1996 that had gradually stopped referring to other shooting games as “Doom clones” and instead as ‘first-person shooters.’

When Jan Willem Nijman, Sos Sosowski and Sven Bergström decided to create the 7 Day FPS Challenge, they first had to voyage to Mount Doom and throw someone’s jewellery into it, before reflecting upon recent and older concepts in videogaming that might be combined in order to create something fresh and new. Still coated in ash and ichor from their journey through Sauron’s kingdom, they settled on merging the indie game-jam with the first-person shooter, in the manner of the popular 7 Day Roguelike competition.

So, to recap:

A first-person shooter is a videogame in which the player shoots things from a first-person perspective, as popularised by the 1993 videogame Doom.

“First-person shooter” can be contracted to “FPS.”

God built the universe in a week, or at least he did if you’re a crazy person who doesn’t believe in evolution. A week comprises seven days.

Jan Willem Nijman, Sos Sosowski and Sven Bergström are orchestrating a worldwide gamejam in which anyone participating attempts to build a first-person shooter with seven days. This is, you see, a “challenge.”

The 7 Day (because it takes place over a week) FPS (because it involves creating a first-person shooter) Challenge (because doing this is quite tricky) commences proper on June 9. You can gaze helplessly at at its non-interactive front-page here, or follow what people are saying about it on Twitter here, but to be honest you’d be better off brainstorming/learning how to make a videogame ahead of the launch in 3 days. We’ll report more soon after the whole shebang kicks off.

(3 days is just under half a week. It is not as much as seven. Therefore, it is not the period in which you should attempt to make a first-person shooter. That would be too much of a challenge, and also not part of this particular challenge. Again, hope this is clear. If there are any questions, you can reach me via fax or pager.)

What would be a Second-Person Shooter? You experience the game through the eyes of every person that’s shot in the face by the protagonist? Or you give directives to the protagonist, and watch them process it?
This warrants more discussion.

Oh, that would be a twist. The only person your gun could damage would be the *first person* you saw. The twist being that you might not have been the first person HE saw.

but then it breaks down if more than one person sees the same person as the first person, but that could be mitigated by a “right of defense” allowing the target person to shoot the person who saw HIM first, even if he didn’t see THEM first.

So, a “first person shooter” where you can only shoot the first person you saw, and the the person who saw YOU first.

If there’s one thing the gaming industry needs, it’s more First Person Shooters.

Seriously though, I’m looking forward to the results. Most entries in these kinds of contests tend to be fairly forgettable, but there’s always one or two with a unique and exciting take on the basic premise that are worth playing.

The main problem is probably that for roguelike you can sink straight into interesting mechanics (Save Scummer, You Only Live Once, Smart Kobold etc…basically insert Jeff Lait here), because they’re not desssperately technically complicated, and have basically no art assets to create—slap down some characters on a grid and, bam, visualisation of game state. (There’s also quite a body of code built up you can leverage and hack about with, like libtcod.)

Even if people hack about with DOOM source ports as a starting point, you’ve still got to draw up sprites for this. If you want to use something like UDK or Unity you’re probably looking at having to create/import/faff with models. That seems quite a lot more work, really.

Minor correction, as far as my age permits me to recall; (chronologically) right between the terms doom-clone and first-person shooter, it was the term corridor shooter that was most frequently used to describe the genre.